Creating Spaces: painter Betsy Eby talks about her artistic life, community and sharing space, both physical and beyond
There are stretches of the northwest coast where the gray-green Pacific Ocean crashes against the rocky shores of old growth conifer forests. It was there, in Seaside, Oregon, a village near the terminus of the Lewis and Clark Trail, hemmed by the Necanicum River to the north and Tillamook Head promontory to the south, where Betsy Eby grew up.
I met with Betsy in her studio, a loft in the old Swift Mill. She showed me around her work space, where she crafts her encaustic paintings. It’s a labor intensive process; she layers heated wax, damar resin and pigment on canvas in almost limpid coats, liquifying them with a blowtorch. When we met, she was working on a new piece. Betsy pointed out a few of the details of the work, the way layers interplay, and to demonstrate, she set the torch to a section. I watched as the layers fused under the heat; when she removed the torch, she encouraged me to touch the surface; the wax was still warm but already solidified. Betsy had many, many more hours of application and coalescence to go.
We settled in to her sitting area, a brightly lit space containing a grand piano, tall bookshelves and two sofas. We talked for two hours about everything under the sun, but we began where all things begin, especially for artists—her childhood. Betsy’s demeanor is calm, and you catch her enthusiasm and contemplation most in her eyes, perhaps because her painting requires such patience and scrupulous crafting. When I asked about childhood, she eased back on the sofa opposite me and closed her eyes for a moment.
Betsy’s father worked in the timber industry. Her earliest, most formative impressions are of the untamed Pacific Northwest, a place she has longed for ever since. She also began playing piano at age five, and music suffuses the life of anyone who takes to it so young, Betsy maybe more so than most. Many of her encaustic works’ titles reference classical music, and those who see rhythms on walks along the Chattahoochee will find them too in her paintings.
Betsy studied art history at the University of Oregon, focusing on antiquities, until a serious car accident interrupted her studies. She remembers her face was imprinted on the windshield. Betsy emerged from the accident with a “voracious desire to paint and play music.” She began exploring the idea of ascension, in the spiritual sense: what is it and what keeps us grounded. She began with acrylics, while also finishing her education, but wanted greater depth in her work, and soon moved to oil. Betsy was searching for greater visual depth in her work, a way to suggest inevitability and obscure her mark-making, exploring how to manifest the aesthetic of ascension.
After college, Betsy moved to Seattle, a city in the midst of a major artistic renaissance, one which would leave a major impression on her own work. Microsoft and Starbucks were starting to balloon; Betsy’s neighborhood was next to Kurt Cobain’s. Betsy rented rooms in an old Victorian home, and soon “commandeered the basement”—her housemates encouraged her work. Her eyes move excitedly when she recalls this time, a time free of calculation or a concerted effort to be an artist. Painting was a thing she was compelled to do; it was “biological,” she said, a manifold compulsion built of the car accident, her childhood. “I never thought I was going to be an artist,” she admitted.
Being compelled, driven to find visual expression of her fascinations, Betsy did the sort of things a person must do in order to be an artist. She took local art classes, learning all she could. Most of all, she spent time in the basement of the Victorian. She copied and imitated works she admired, which she says is a natural step for artists. She also explored, developed her own rhythms and phrasings. When she was not exploring in the basement, and in order to pay her way, Betsy worked.
“I developed a business where I worked with architects and designers doing color consulting and specialty materials installation,” she explained. “Seattle was (and continues to be) booming, so I worked with some of the greatest taste makers, including world renowned architect, Tom Kundig.”
When Betsy was 27 or 28, she took at trip to Massachusetts, where she visited the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. There, a William Turner painting captivated her. Turner was an English romantic painter, known for his turbulent and expressive paintings, particularly landscapes and marine paintings. The work resonated with her formative impressions of the seaside in Oregon. There, Betsy had her “aha experience,” as she called it. “I had to be a painter or I would live a false life.”
Betsy began to understand her mission to “create spaces,” to find “the place that’s unmoored from day to day concrete reality.” Betsy said that “painting is communicating the unsayable,” but exploring the unsayable drives us to a shared ineffable experience. She finds the sweet spot of art to be a synthesis of the personal and universal, “a space for people to feel something.” Feeling, to genuinely experience and let course through your self a feeling, requires an intense patience. “I don’t think I would have had these awakenings if I had been on Instagram every day.”
“Finding your person language is about being still enough,” Betsy explained, “paying attention to what’s going on in our own emotional bodies… we have to be willing to feel… stay present to feeling.”
Amid books on art and music on the bookshelves behind me, I recognized many titles; Kierkegaard and Thomas Merton stood out to me, authors for whom this stillness was so vital. I thought of the concentration of the concert pianist, the way the mathematical notes on the page take on life and visceral movement when played by a person with deep feeling. It occurred to me that in the life of an artist a continuity develops, and thread of fascination, a movement almost melodic that courses through their various interests—their music, reading, work and civic activities. I began to review my notes, trying to reground myself in the conversation after losing my place with thinking about the synthesis of universal and personal—and then Betsy brought up a project that made real this junction.
In 2018, the State Department approached Betsy through the Art in Embassies Program, a public-private partnership that promotes cultural diplomacy by connecting American and foreign artists. Betsy had worked with the program for years, loaning pieces to embassies around the world, but now they wanted to sed her to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. She was to teach and lecture on art and careers in the arts, but Best said “the real charge was female empowerment.”
Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands face many challenges, from the exploitation of natural resources by larger powers to dramatic and immediate damage resulting from climate change. But these nations are also incredibly violent, primarily a result of the abject poverty experienced by much of the population, which is driven by economic exploitation. Betsy said the mission was the “hardest, most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” but “did I get a massive education about the world order and geopolitics.”
Betsy spent a lot of time with women, working with them on their art and their careers in art. “When you come in in an egalitarian way, as artists can do,” Betsy said of her approach to these workshops, “people open up when you relate on equal levels through art.” In a society where women have limited choices, one of the things Betsy was able to do was give permission—so often we, whatever our circumstances, don’t even consider a life path until someone simply speaks the truth that we can pursue it. One woman in particular stood out to Betsy. At the beginning of the class, she was quiet, shut down. At the end of the class, Betsy had an open forum, where students could share about their experience. At the end of the class, the woman spoke. Betsy recalled the woman had “felt nothing when she came” but left with a sense of a new, enormous horizon to explore. “This was her permission-giving moment,” Betsy said of the class; “no woman had ever told her she could do what she wanted.”
The woman wanted to study design; she told Betsy, “I’ll see you o the runway in Paris.”
Betsy’s look was focused, intent, determined. This is the value of art.
Art connects. We can say something universal, even and especially in our own personal languages. The resonance comes from moments of mutual comprehension, where we recognize in a work, in a language not our own, the same ineffable experience that is ours ad everyone’s. And when we can share that—whether it’s with our art or with our encouragement to others to make art—we build a better community. However small each particular instance of creation and encouragement, together the drops build into waves, into oceans, and we push ourselves and our communities toward openness. As Betsy said, “artists are the storytellers, the torchbearers for meaning.”
Six years ago, Betsy moved to Columbus with her husband and fellow artist, Bo Bartlett. Columbus is Bo’s childhood home, and they came excited to be a part of the community’s growth. “Artists are always starved for space, light and time,” Betsy said, “and Columbus has that.”
Since 2001, Betsy has shown work in a Seattle gallery space designed by her old friend Tom Kundig. “I had first hand experience in how his architecture supports art installations,” Betsy said. “So when Bo and I were in the early developmental years of planning the [Bo Bartlett] Center, I knew Tom would be the perfect fit. I invited him to Columbus. He took the project and Columbus now has his gorgeous architectural gem to call its own.”
“We look forward to future exhibitions as we collaborate with our museum contacts throughout the United States, dealers in NY and artist friends from both coasts. In addition to hosting world class art exhibitions, we are excited about screening films, hosting panel discussions, concerts and alike, as well as continuing the ongoing outreach programs that have already touched so many lives.
“We feel passionate about Columbus being a place where young, creative people want to live and prosper. The Bo Bartlett Center is our way of contributing to its growth and vitality.”
As I was leaving her studio, Betsy gifted me a copy of her book; it contains images of her work alongside insightful essays. You can find a copy of the book by visiting her website, BetsyEby.com, which is also a wonderful place to view more of her work and to keep up with ongoing and upcoming projects; there’s far more than we can include here. For more information about the Bo Bartlett Center, including events and the Center’s inspiring outreach programs, please visit BoBartlettCenter.org.